World of Goo Blowout

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A world of impressions, videos, and screenshots of one of WiiWare's most promising titles.

By Daemon Hatfield

At Nintendo's media event here in San Francisco back in April, the company was showcasing World of Goo as one of its premiere WiiWare games. And with good reason -- this physics-based puzzler sports more polish and ingenuity than most of what has been offered for download thus far. When you first boot up the game and see the stylish interface you may be surprised it was developed by just three guys. 2D Boy is, fittingly, two fellows who built the game in multiple coffee shops in the Bay area taking advantage of the cafes' wi-fi. A third player was brought in to optimize World of Goo for Wii (it's also being released on PC).

The game reminds us of Braid, recently released for Xbox Live Arcade. Not in terms of gameplay, as this is a sticky puzzler and Braid is a time-shifting platformer. But both titles are smaller, downloadable games developed by tiny teams and, yet, they are more visually, aurally, and technically impressive than many full-featured retail releases. The gist of Goo is you have to maneuver gluey balls across inventive obstacles to a goal. Controls are very simple: you point with the remote and grab balls with the A button. The balls can be stacked together to create platforms, bridges, and other means of transportation, but they are governed by the laws of physics and will topple and twist realistically. It feels really good to play -- even the cursor feels more responsive than most games.

There is a variety of goo types, and each possesses different properties that need to be exploited in order to achieve your goals. The black balls are your standard building blocks. Greens cling to walls, harnessing the mysterious power of friction to scale surfaces. Balloon blobs can lift goo structures into the air. 2D Boy really got inventive with Goo's many game mechanics. One of the key things to keep in mind while playing is that even though these balls need to be taken advantage of, most of them can only be used a few times a piece. If you're not careful you can successfully build a path to the exit pipe, only to find out you don't have enough remaining balls to fulfill the quota.